Istanbul-New York-Tel Aviv

Named after the three cities I live in, this blog will focus on Israeli, Palestinian, and Turkish politics and social issues. In addition, I will periodically cover other topics related to the Middle East.

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Haaretz: "One iconic but solitary Israeli poet celebrated Ahed Tamimi’s heroism: The backlash he endured means there'll be even less mainstream dissent in the future."A rare voice of opposition rose up recently in Israel against the wave of justifications for the arrest of the young 17-year-old Palestinian girl, Ahed Tamimi, who slapped an Israeli soldier in her West Bank home town of Nabeh Saleh, and is being held without bail until her trial in a military court.The iconic Israeli poet Jonathan Geffen posted this short poem on hisInstagram feed, portraying the teenager as a victim of the occupation:A young beautiful 17-year-old girl has done something terribleAnd when a proud Israeli officer raided her homeShe dished him out a slappingShe was born into this, and in that slapThere were 50 years of occupation and shameAnd, on the day the story of the struggle will be toldOh, Ahed TamimiThe redheadLike David slapped GoliathYou will be immortalized along withJoan of Arc, Hannah Senesh and Anne FrankThe poem outraged many in Israel. How dare Geffen compare a "Palestinian criminal" with Anne Frank? Was Geffen comparing Jews to Nazis? Clearly, Geffen’s intention was to highlight Tamimi’s heroism, and to note it will become one day be part of the Palestinian national narrative.However, few in Israel had patience to hear him out. While he was portrayed as traitor among many in Israel’s political right, others, even from the liberal camp, quickly passed it off as a crazed moment of a great poet. As the story about the poem went viral, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman demanded Israel’s popular Army Radioban Geffen’s work, despite his canonical status in Israel akin to, or even exceeding, Bob Dylan. And, while Israel does not have a royal family, the Geffens belong to the legendary families of Moshav Nahalal, home also to his famous uncle, wartime hero and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.Lieberman slammed Geffen, suggesting his work was more suitable for the Hezbollah television network. He said: "The State of Israel will not provide a platform for a drunkard who compares a girl who perished in the Holocaust and a hero who combated the Nazi regime with Ahed Tamimi, a brat who attacked a soldier. Geffen's headline chasing is sickening and outrageous."Joining Lieberman, Israel’s culture minister, Miri Regev blasted Geffen, calling Tamimi a "terror-supporting criminal," and commenting that "the ghastly comparison between the heroes of our people's Holocaust and terrorist Tamimi, on the same week the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is crossing a red line by someone seeking to rewrite history." Well, while calls to boycott Geffen grew on the right, Army Radio didn’t heed the call to boycott or censor, and its popular morning radio host, Razi Barkai, even opened his show with one of Geffen’s most famous songs, the 1970’s "Prettiest Girl in Kindergarten." Undermining Lieberman, the head of Army Radio rejected Lieberman’s demand, just as Israel’s Attorney General, who also clarified that the Defense Minister had no legal standing to order the boycott. Then, in a surprise move, Geffen himselfissued an apologyat an evening performance. In a question-answer session during his show, he clarified that he had no wish to harm the memory of the Holocaust and that it was a mistake to have brought Hannah Senesh and Anne Frank into the story and that, "Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I can tell you that it was a mistake, and I apologize for it, especially to those who were personally hurt."He also seized the moment to reiterate his staunch opposition to the occupation, while stressing that he was an Israeli patriot, as if his lifelong contribution to Israeli culture was not enough to confirm this. Shortly thereafter, Liebermanacceptedhis apology via Twitter, stating the Biblical phrase, "He who confesses and recants shall find mercy." Geffen may have apologized, but he didn’t delete the poem from his Instagram account.But rather than anger, Israel’s right-wing should have felt satisfaction from the whole affair. After all, Geffen was the only public figure they had to try and censor. Geffen’s was a lone voice highlighting Tamimi’s plight. And a lone, 71-year-old artist, who belongs to the old elite of Israel, is no challenge to 50 years of occupation and colonization. Let’s face it, most of Israel’s youth could care less what’s written on his Instagram account.Geffen is a relic of Israel’s past where major cultural figures raising their voice in resistance to Israel’s policies regarding the Palestinians was actually a mainstream phenomenon.That was a generation of singers such as Nurit Galron and Chava Alberstein, or the younger Si Hayman, who, during the First Intifada in the late 1980s, were banned from Army Radio, and shunned generally by public radio, for songs protesting the occupation.

Galron’s "Après nous, le déluge"(Ahkrenu HaMabul) in fact could be about Tamimi herself: "Don't tell me about the 12-year old girl" who lost her eye, her home, her childhood; "It just makes me feel terrible....We have a state of stones and Molotov cocktails, while in Tel Aviv we have parties, live our lives, we eat and drink."And, while Tamimi did not lose her eye, the same day she slapped a soldier, her 15-year-oldyoung cousin, Muhammad, was shot in the head at close range, acquiring severe injuries and a recovery that will take years, if not a lifetime. Then, in the late 1980s, these singers were athreatto the establishment: they had large popular followings, hits in the charts. There was a need to censor Si Hayman, who in "Shooting and Crying," asked, "When did we learn to bury people alive? When did we forget that our own children were once killed?" as she learns from a Palestinian street cleaner that his life in the territories has been turned upside down by the Intifada.Then, there was Chava Alberstein, who did a rendition of the traditional Passover Had Gadya song.In her version, she added one more question to the festive four questions of the Haggadah: "How much longer will this circle of violence continue?" adding that she no longer knows who she is: "Once a lamb and now a savage wolf."

It would be foolish to claim that these songs led to the rise of Rabin in 1992, and the subsequent peace process that led to the Oslo Accords, but the banned songs of 1988 were part of cumulative effect of protest parallel to the growing voice of the Peace Now movement and the Israeli disillusionment with the 1982 Lebanon War.During this time, voices like peace firebrand Shulamit Aloni’s rang out daily in the Knesset, reminding us that we were no longer the oppressed, but now the oppressor. This came in tandem with nightly political shows discussing Benny Morris’ groundbreaking work, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem," exposing Israelis to the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. It was in these years they started to hear for the first time the word "Nakba" as well.Back then Israel only had one television channel, and the whole country tuned into the nightly news at the same time. I will never forget walking in the summertime in Tel Aviv’s streets, hearing an entire unbroken news broadcast, newscaster Haim Yavin’s voice perfectly audible as it was relayed through successive open balconies.During the First Intifada, a whole nation watched as their boys as soldiers beat Palestinians, and Palestinian women, very much like Ahed, were crying and slapping the soldiers as their young boys were dragged away to detention. It was during these years that many Israelis came to terms with the fact that this reality could not continue.Well, Rabin was assassinated, the Oslo Accords failed, the Second Intifada came and went, and Alberstein’s "vicious circle" only became more entrenched in blood. Walls were built and a new generation was born in Israel.For those coming of age in Israel today, the conflict is a well-maintained one (all the while for Palestinians it remains a daily struggle), and Israel today is the safest it has been in decades. For most young people today, there is no Green Line, rather there is a wall that most will never cross, and there is even an university in Ariel built on occupied land, while one can reach the Holy City of Hebron today without almost not seeing any Palestinians. Politically speaking, what was once right wing is, today, mainstream.

(See Haaretz clip on Tamimi arrest).Ahed Tamimi was only arrested after the video of her went viral in the Israeli media, meaning the soldiers who she slapped did not see fit to arrest her, rather she was arrested only after the media held a campaign against that "blonde" Palestinian girl. It was the media that put her on trial, and it was the Israeli public that found her guilty.Nowadays most of the Israeli public isn’t watching critical news programs. As TV channels opened up to private competition, they focused on completely depoliticized pop culture figures, who appear on endless reality shows. And, if by chance Arabs are participants on these shows, they are handpicked and sanitized for the Jewish majority. There’s no "conflict" on primetime.It is in this atmosphere that Israel’s right wing, together with the media, has enough political and cultural power to sell Ahed Tamimi to the Israeli public as an almost existential nightmare for the nation.Even they, however, won’t be able to erase the iconic status she’s achieved: Her slap gave a human face to the Palestinians that the world sees, but most Israelis are blind to. Sad, but true, if she’d had a knife in her hand, she’d most likely had been shot dead, and would barely have made the nightly news, remaining the invisible enemy the Palestinians have become.However, Ahed Tamimi is very much alive, and she is not going anywhere. She is here to stay, and will be with us long after the debate over Geffen’s poem dies out. As for Israel’s current culture heroes, it’s likely Geffen’s case will act as as a lesson, or a warning. If they do speak out that they will be tried in the public square, and say goodbye to their careers. That’s the power of self-censorship.In any case, that silence, or deliberate ‘forgetting’, of the injustices Israel is committing against the Palestinians puts them in good company: most of Israel’s center-left, whether Labor or Meretz, have also adopted the same operative strategy.*This article appeared in Haaretz on November 30,2017. Click here for theLink:

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Haaretz: "Turkey's LGBT community is a tangible, visual challenge to Erdogan's vision of an Islamically 'pious generation' – and now he's cracking down on them, with enthusiastic support from other Islamists and ultra-nationalists."A week ago, the governor of Turkey’s capital city banned all events - "cinema, theater, panels, interviews, exhibitions" - relating to the gay, lesbian and transgender community from taking place in the nation’s capital in the name of the wider "community’s public sensitivity [and] to provide peace and security." The governor’s official statement went on to say: "Such events publicly harbor hatred and hostilityand therefore pose a risk to public safety and morality."It was only a matter of time until the ban reached Istanbul. And so it was: days later an LGBT-related film screening, to be held at the Pera Museum, was also banned by the Istanbul governor’s office, who claimed that the organizers had failed to submit the proper authorization papers. Why is Turkey cracking down on its gay and lesbian community right now? Is it an assertion of Islamist identity politics and a kick at secular opponents of an increasingly authoritarian regime? And how reasonable is it to assume that the orders for this repression came from President Erdogan at the top, with provincial governors acting as mere agents of the government?If the intention was to silence the LGBT community, it didn't work, at least in the short term.Two Ankara-based LGBT organizations, Kaos GL and Pembe Hayat, vowed to take legal steps to reverse the governor’s "illegal, discriminatory and arbitrary ban," and added that "there can be no legitimate or legal grounds for such a wholesale ban that touches the core of [our] rights." Defying the ban, students at Ankara’s prestigious Middle East Technical University screened a gay-oriented film. The university cut the electricity in order to stop the screening. Fortunately, the Turkish police opted not to use force against the students, who went on to march and chant slogans supporting LGBT rights.Follwing that, a massive march held for the international day against violence against women included protesters proudly demonstrating with LGBT rainbow flags, a scene that has been less common on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara since 2015, when the annual Pride March was broken up by police with batons and water cannon. Although the police threatened intervention over the flags, the march ended peacefully. The LGBT ban should be seen in the wider context of Turkey’s ongoing clampdown on civil society. The first spike came during the Gezi Park protests, but accelerated since last year’s failed coup, when Turkey came under a State of Emergency that continues up to today.The great pressure Turkey’s LGBT community has been under for several years contrasts with the early 2000s, when the community experienced a kind of public renaissance. At that time, Erdogan’s AKP was winning support from liberals, and a civil society niche for the LGBT community flourished.During those years, the LGBT community built coalitions with many other civil society organizations, not least those representing other oppressed minorities, such as Kurds. This solidarity led the mostly Kurdish party, the HDP, to adopt an ambitious agenda that advocated for LGBT rights - despite their mostly conservative voter base.The secular, yet more socially conservative, opposition party, the CHP, began to take part in discussions at the annual LGBT Pride lecture series. It, like the HDP, gradually opened its doors to openly gay and transgender candidates within the party.That bridge-building paid off: By 2014, tens of thousands of allies were joining marchers in the Pride March, since banned. Of course, this is only one side of the picture.For the ruling AKP, LGBT issues for years were too much of a taboo to address, both among the party leadership and its constituency. During its long rulethere have been plenty of of homophobic slurs by AKP members. However, these spiked as the LGBT community became more politically ambitious, as was evident during the 2015 parliamentary elections.Then-prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, stated during the campaign that "Gays caused the destruction of the [Biblical] tribe of Lot, and the HDP offers [a gay] candidate." Just earlier this month, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who rarely mentions the subject of LGBT people, openly criticized a neighborhood committee controlled by the CHP for introducing positive discrimination quotas for LGBT participants, saying they had "broken their ties with our nation’s values." Clearly, the more LGBT community members enter the political arena, local or national, the more they pose a threat to the AKP: They offer a tangible, visual challenge to Erdogan’s attempts to raise a "pious generation," based on Islamic values. Just as important, the AKP’s attacks paint the opposition as being hopelessly liberal and out-of-sync with the generally conservative Turkish population at large, and has worked diligently to promote rifts within the opposition, where acceptance of LGBT rights does not enjoy the wholehearted support of all members.The AKP is, of course, also tending to its socially and religiously conservative base, and its anti-LGBT line also has the potential to attract hardline nationalists.The increasingly homophobic tone of the government strengthens various Islamist constituencies, who take it as carte blanche for broadcasting repugnant anti-LGBT slurs, often in the same pro-government media where vicious anti-Semitism is an almost daily occurrence.Turkish ultra-nationalists have also joined the fray. One group threatened last year’s Pride, which gave the government a proximate reason to block it for the following year to secure the "security of the marchers, tourists, and residents." It is in this context of support that the recent across-the-board ban of all LGBT events is a first sign of what could easily become an accelerating repression.With rampant homophobia and violence - often hitting hard at the transgender community - LGBT individuals in Turkey have few safe spaces to express themselves, meet, and organize. Now, with these bans, this space will shrink further.It's disheartening but perhaps not unsurprising that the Turkish government's anti-gay direction has many similarities with the officially-sanctioned persecution of the LGBT community in Russia and Egypt, where gays and lesbians are at any and every moment subject to harassment and assault if they dare organize any type of public expression. However, it is important to remember that Turkey’s LGBT organizations are rooted in decades-old resistance and are no stranger to animosity.Even if there is a sustained clampdown, the seeds planted by activists, and by those activists in political circles, university organizations, and other civil society groups, know how to continue working and organizing.And they'll also be strengthened by a wider circle of sympathizers and allies built by patient debate and interactions who, just a decade ago, would never have imagined that they would be defending the rights of the gay and lesbian community.

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Haaretz: "If Turkey hadn't directly provoked the U.S., reports of its human rights violations would be collecting dust. Now, with red lines being crossed and Americans targeted, Congress is upping the ante."It's been more than two weeks since the United States suspended the issuing of all non-immigrant visas in Turkey, halting the travel to the U.S. of thousands of Turkish citizens. Tit-for-tat, Turkey announced it would stop issuing e-visas and airport visas to U.S. citizens arriving directly from U.S. destinations.American sanctions on Turkey come as Turkish citizens working at the U.S. consular offices in Ankara have been targeted by the Turkish government’s expanding purge: two consular workers have so far been detained.U.S. visa sanctions sent shock waves through Turkey, especially for those accustomed to frequent travel to the U.S. over the last decade. Turkish Airlines’ extensive U.S. flight schedule is testament to the Turkish demand for interconnectivity with the U.S. Thousands have had their plans put on hold or cancelled altogether.Thus far, the damage has been limited. Since U.S. visas often have a ten-year expiration date, many still have no problem getting through; and, for those desperate to get to a U.S. destination without a current visa, they can also apply through a third country - though that’s certainly a costly and time-consuming process. Unlike in Turkey, in the U.S., the visa suspensions have barely made the headlines, and Turkey’s reciprocal act - while in line with diplomatic protocol - shortsightedly hurts its own interests far more. Turkish Airlines has reported a 45 percent drop in reservations from Turkey to the U.S.But even if the visa issue hasn’t made much impact newswise for many Americans, Turkey’s image has already hit rock bottom, thanks to other events that have indeed made a media impact, not least Erdogan’s intemperate language towards the U.S., and the whole sorry episode of his presidential guards who beat up protestors in D.C. The complimentary image of Turkey I used to hear described in America has been replaced by one dominant take: Turkey as an authoritarian state. And, as the political situation in the country has worsened, the many students, colleagues and friends who once streamed to Turkey, slowly stopped going.Now, those friends and colleagues tell me before I go there to visit: "Be careful."Back in 2015-2016, "be careful" referred to one’s personal safety.During those years, Turkey was struck by ISIS and PKK terror, one bomb coming a bit too close for comfort, hundreds of yards from a student group I was leading last in early 2016. Turkey has been able to bring back a sense of security to its streets.However, following the 2016 attempted coup and the ensuing State of Emergency, which has led to the arrest of tens of thousands, "be careful" has become a wider warning: "Beware of protests", and "beware of protesting". Americans saw firsthand how protesters in Washington D.C. were attacked by Erdogan’s guards.It would be equally relevant to add further warnings to visitors: "Beware of journalism", after Wall Street Journal reporter Ayla Albayrak was sentenced to two years in jail in absentia for an article she wrote that the government condemned as "terrorist propaganda".And they also could add "beware of human rights activism", in relation to the members of Amnesty International, who were released last night on bail after spending almost 100 days in jail (Turkey’s Amnesty chairperson, Taner Kilic, is still in custody).And "beware of working with NGOs of any kind", after the recent arrest of Osman Kavala, who has played a key role in promoting civil society and international art projects.And "beware of just being an American who can be used as a hostage", after U.S. media coverage of an American pastor, Andrew Brunson, who’s been held for over a year on dubious espionage charges, went up a gear since fears were raised that Brunson is being used as a bargaining chip by Turkey. That was after Erdogan hinted that he could be exchanged for Fetullah Gulen, the Islamic cleric wanted in Turkey for allegedly masterminding the coup. The sad reality is if Turkey had minded the diplomatic niceties and worked to stay off the radar of the U.S. and had avoided unnecessary conflict, most of the overflowing and documented human rights violations in Turkey would have remained tucked away in reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.How many Americans realize (or care) that the co-chairs of the third largest political party, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag of the mostly Kurdish HDP, are behind bars, together with a long list of other MPs from the same party, effectively silencing the opposition?As news of Turkey’s human rights violations become more mainstream, there is a growing bipartisan consensus in the U.S. Congress that Turkey has crossed all democratic and rule of law red lines.Despite concerted attempts by Turkey to sideline Congress and State Department officials, Erdogan’s attempts to carry out a direct line of communication with U.S. president Donald Trump, for now, at least, seems to have failed as a strategy.Just yesterday, U.S. senators sent a bipartisan letter to President Trump expressing their grave concern over the "continuing erosion of human rights and decline of democratic values in Turkey."As Turkey repivots closer to Russia, and as more voices arise in the U.S. calling to rethink the historic strategic relations between the two countries, Turkey is on track to fatally tarnish its image in the United States, risking not only a key ally but also the chance of Turkey once again becoming a magnet for American investment and support. America is also paying a price, absorbing varied geopolitical losses as Turkey retreats.This article appeared in Haaretz on October 30,2017. Click here for the link